Che Library 


of the 


From the Library of 
Charles L..Coon 


Cp 3lo4 
Sism 


Bes 


‘ The Re-Creation 


OF 


Mary Smith 


By 
Ben Dixon MacNeill 


ie bee) 

E PUBLISHED BY 

i}; SraTE BOARD OF CHARITIES AND PUBLIC WELFARE 
RALEIGH, N. C. 


FOREWORD 


This story appeared in the News and Ob- 
server, of whose staff the author is a mem- 
ber, November 28, 1920. Thousands of read- 
ers recognized in it a literary touch of high 
order and wondered if there is not developing — 
in the State another MacNeill genius whose 
accomplishment in prose might some day be 
expected to parallel that of the other Mac- 
Neill in verse. 

This is the story of the real Mary Smiths 
that we are turning out and what may be 
expected to happen to them at Samarcand — 
Manor. The hberty of reproducing it in 
pamphlet form is taken because it is due the 
people of the State to let as many of them as 
possible know what measures they have taken 
to correct the tragedies of the Mary Smiths 
which we are producing, and help them to 
decide what they are willing to do to carry 
on the work. 

R. F. Brasury, 
State Commissioner of Public Welfare. 


The Re-Creation of Mary Smith 


By BEN DIxoN MACNEILL. 


“It is the judgment of this court that the 
defendant Mary Smith be sentenced to Samar- 
eand for an indefinite period.” So spoke the 
judge. Before him stood a shrinking, broken, 
young-old woman, staring hard at the floor. 
Behind her, crowding the courtroom to the 
doors, most of the men of a virtuous com- 
munity gathered to witness the spectacle of 
a “fallen woman” gibbeted in the courts upon 
a charge of gross immorality. 

The prosecution had averred that the woman 
had been guilty of gross immoralities, that she 
had publicly solicited the attentions of men, 
that she had wandered the streets at night 
seeking her prey, that she was a menace to 
society and ought to be sentenced to prison. 
There was no defense. For herself the wo- 
man said nothing. To the questioning of the 
judge she answered that she was 16 years 
old. No defense save her years. She hung 
her head so the brim of her cheap headgear 
hid her face. 

The men of a virtuous community looked 
on vaguely. Since the men of the race quit 
stoning their women who strayed off the nar- 
row road of virtue appointed them, and wrote 
laws whereby they should be punished, the 
summoning of a woman publicly to answer 
that law has called the morbid curiosity born 
of repression. Here was a spectacle. Here 
was an open discussion of a thing that the race 
had decreed must not be openly talked about. 

They wondered vaguely how she came to be 
there. They looked furtively at one another 
when the prosecuting attorney loosed invective 
upon the shrinking, shamed creature huddled 
alone before the bar. They wondered what 


3 


P11S73 


Samarcand might be and what it could do foi 
so abandoned a creature as the attorney wa; 
picturing. Clearly a place where the creatur¢ 
would be bound with chains to restrain hei 
lust. And what would become of her wher 
the “indefinite sentence” was done? 

An officer tapped the woman on the shoul. 
der. “Come along,” he said briefly, and the 
woman was led out. The court turned 
other and lesser menaces. It had performec 
its duty. No more would this outcast wandei 
the highroads to hell seeking to drag youtk 
along to hell with her. She was gone, gone 
to Samarcand. The burden of her degeneracy 
was shifted away to other shoulders. The vir- 
tuous community thought no more of Mary 
Smith, the “fallen woman.” 

It is a long way to Samarcand from any 
where one starts. It is on the western rim 
of that region known as the Sandhills, three 
miles back from the railroad and the station 
that is named after a town in India where the 
father of Signor Pompelli was once befriend- 
ed. Signor Pompelli is an Italian who has 
built him an estate in the western edge of 
Moore County, and modeled it after the iand 
of his nativity. He has vast orchards of 
peaches. 

Three miles west of the railroad that plie; 
between Aberdeen and ‘Ashboro ithere ‘was 
once a select school for boys owned by a noted 
ascetic, Dr. Hanford Henderson. He built 
for a hundred boys, fashioning his houses af- 
ter the style of the Swiss. They fit admirably 
into their alien landscape. The war disrupted 
the Doctor’s school, and his health deserted 
him. He sold the State the Manor, and it 
came to be Samarcand. Officially the name of 
the institution is the State Home and In- 
dustrial School for Girls and Women. By uni- 
versal acceptance, it is called Samarcand in- 
stead. 

To this pleasant place came Mary Smith, 
marked with the stigma of criminal conviction, 
with the bitterness of a scorned woman in her 
heart. The world had cursed her with the bit- 
terest curse that may sear a-woman’s soul, 


4 


She was filled with hate against decent people. 
[his place, Samarcand, would add only to her 
xitterness. Almost death would be preferable 
co “indefinite sentence” in this place. Better 
pack to the gruesome life of the streets than 
aere! 

A pleasant faced woman greeted her with 
matter-of-fact kindness when the officer who 
osrought her there bundled her out. There 
was none of superiority, of patronizing virtue 
addressing outcast depravity in the woman’s 
manner. She spoke quietly, much as if she 
aad known Mary Smith for all her 16 years 
nn the world and had never heard that she 
was other than the sort of girl she ought to be. 
[The officer proffered a few papers and the 
woman took them. He looked accusingly at 
the girl and turned away home, glad to see 
che last of her. 

The place looked anything but like a jail. 
The Manor was a large, pleasant building, 
with airy, comfortable rooms. There were 
no bars on the windows, no armed guards 
pacing back and forth. Now since Mary Smith 
was raked in off the streets weeks back she was 
without an officer within forbidding reach of 
ner. The kindly woman asked her to sit down 
for a little while. Presently a girl in blue 
denim ‘“‘bloomers” came in and the woman 
asked her to take Mary Smith down to the 
infirmary for a bath and some new clothes. 

She went. She felt better after she had 
washed away the stain of the jail back at home 
and the grime of travel. A nurse spoke pleas- 
antly to her. After she had bathed, the nurse 
examined her closely, careful for any trace of 
any disease. Fortunately for Mary Smith she 
had not suffered contamination. Others be- 
fore her had been less fortunate and others 
since. It is their lot to be segregated until 
they are pronounced clean. 

__ The infirmary was a pretty brown-shingled 
‘little building. There were clean white wards, 
there was an operating room, a little kitchen. 
Girls in blue denim were apparently in charge 
of the place with the nurse supervising them 


5 


but in nowise bossing them. . . . On the 
sleeping porch there were four little babies. 
Their mothers worked nearby and attended 
them when they needed it. They seemed very 
young, most of these mothers. One of them 
seemed scarce 15 years old. 

After a while there was supper in the big 
dining room with more than 150 girls and 
young women crowding happily. A _ girl 
waited on each table, while an older girl 
served from the head of the table. She did 
it with careful attention to the details of polite 
usages in eating. It was new to Mary Smith, 
and she felt a keen embarrassment in her ig- 
norance. The girls were gay. They talked of 
work. 

One girl proclaimed the excellence of one 
Evangeline. This Evangeline, it seemed, was 
a cow, an aristocratic bovine under the per- 
sonal supervision of the girl. A girl at an- 
other table decried Evangeline, insisting that 
one Millicent was a far superior cow, albeit 
her horns were not as long as those worn 
by Evangeline. There was talk of corkscrew 
divers, of how many gallons of blackberry 
jam had been made that day, of a game of 
volleyball after supper. Mary Smith almost 
forgot the aching disgrace of being an out- 
cast. 

The girls trooped out after supper and 
Mary Smith was left alone in the big dining 
room. True, she had been asked to go to the 
lake, but she did not know how to accept kind- 
ness. Anyhow there was that little woman 
who had met her at the door sitting over by 
a window. Mary Smith felt like she would 
like to talk to that woman. Maybe she would 
Ten that she had not intended to be 

ad. 

Mary Smith will never know how she came 
to be sitting beside the little woman on the 
window seat looking out over the low sandhills 
toward sunset. She will never understand how 
she came to be telling her the things that she 


could never tell a court, or a lawyer. The 


‘little woman listened kindly, understandingly, 
with here and there a word when Mary Smith 


6 


faltered, unknowing whether to go on, or to 
run away and hide forever. 

Mary Smith’s life had its beginnings in. a 
cotton mill. Her father never worked steadily, 
he was bad to his wife, his children worked 
for the family’s living. There was no school- 
ing, but she could read a little, and write her 
name. That was all. The mother had died. 
The father’s brutality increased. That was a 
year ago. At night there was no staying at 
home. For clothes there was no money—the 
father required it all. He needed liquor. She 
took to going out, and her father abused her 
for it. She went more and was afraid to go 
home. 

There were other girls who went out at 
night. They fell in with boys, older -than 
they were, of course. They went to moving 
pictures. Sometimes they hugged her and 
sometimes they forced their kisses upon her. 
She was afraid at first, but it was the only 
way that the favor of a man could be won. 
They asked more, and it was given. Finally, 
the overt step that takes a woman across the 
thin line between what is called right and 
what is called wrong. She hadn’t wanted to 
do it, but somehow she couldn’t help it. 

Life at home was intolerable. Sometimes 
she stayed out all night and went to work in 
the morning. Sometimes she did not go to 
work, and went home while her father was 
away, and slept. She had to make money 
enough somehow to make good her weekly 
earnings. She sold herself to get the money. 
She was not paid much. Finally they got 
her and sent her to Samarcand. 

The little woman said nothing at all. She 
uttered no platitudes. She quoted no scrip- 
tures, she did not tell the girl she had done 
wrong. She listened and let the girl pour 
out her story. She let her cry until she was 
ready for bed. She patted Mary Smith’s 
shoulder as she said goodnight to her. When 
she was gone to the big room where a dozen 
cots were waiting for a dozen girls, none of 
the women questioned her. None ,of them 
mentioned the fact that they themselves had 


T 


come there under like shadows. They were 
too happily tired for talk. 

Two girls on nearby cots talked of an elec- 
tion that would be held on the following Satur- 
day. Strange to say, the election was to be 
held right there, and a certain girl over in 
the next room was a candidate for some office. 
So also was another girl in another part of 
the house. The first mentioned, it seemed, was 
sure of election. So and so had promised to 
support her, and had got all the girls in her 
room to promise their votes. 

There was mention of the Student Council, 
a thing, it seemed, that sort of run the place, 
needing only the final approval of the little 
fair-haired woman, which was rarely withheld. 
Had she not that day approved the sentence 
of the Council when it decreed that one Liz- 
zie Somebody should not go near the lake for 
a week? Lizzie had uttered “damn” under 
some provocation or other. 

Morning came, breakfast, and the girls and 
women separated into groups, a teacher with 
each group. Before breakfast ten of them had 
gone down and milked Evangeline and Milli- 
cent and the other aristocrats of the barn. 
Another had administered to Jake and Jane, 
the mules. Two others had served breakfast 
to the Countess of Samarcand, the Lord of the 
Manor, and their well bred children over in a 
neighboring pen. These were the swine. Oth- 
ers had fed some 200 chickens, and one girl 
had seen that a score of young turkeys had 
been properly looked after. 

There was wood to be brought in. There was 
the week’s laundry to be done. The Manor 
had to be put to rights, the Chalet, a comely 
little house where 32 girls live by themselves. 
There was the 75-acre farm to be looked after. 
But first there was a half hour of “setting up” 
and then prayer service in the chapel. Mary 
Smith stood by, having no part with these 
happy activities while they got under way. 

“You may go down to the lake with the 
laundry girls today,” the fair-haired lady told 
her. She,went gladly. Never had she enjoyed 
anything so much as she did the honest work 


8 


of scrubbing clothes in tin tubs by the twink- 
ling little lake set under a hill below the Chalet. 
Afterwards the athletic teacher came down, 
and they all went swimming. Some of the 
girls beat those divers she had seen in diving 
girl comedies at the moving pictures back 
home. 

Thus began the re-creation of Mary Smith. 
In the afternoon she went to school. She 
studied in books, she learned to cook. She 
learned to play. She learned all the intricacies 
of running canning machinery. She learned 
to work. She grew strong. Her face lost 
that sickly blight that comes to the face of 
the “fallen woman,” and took on the ruddy, 
sunburned glow of perfect health. She forgot 
the urge of sex as if it had dropped out of her 
consciousness. It didn’t fit into the spirit of 
the landscape at all. 

In time she learned that the girls around 
her had been as bad, and worse, than she had 
been. Some of them were mothers of one or 
more children. Some of them had come to 
Samarcand foully diseased. Some of them had 
had children after they came there. But these 
things were never talked. Sometimes they 
wanted to talk to the fair-haired woman about 
it, and she let them talk about it. They asked 
her advice about things and she gave it to 
them. The past dropped away like a night- 
mare that goes with waking. It was too un- 
real, and too far away to mean anything. It 
might not have happened at all. 

One Saturday late in the summer the word 
was passed that they were going on a hike that 
afternoon, taking along their blankets, and 
camping out. They wandered far, scattering 
as they willed over the countryside. Mary 
Smith got separated from the crowd. How 
She didn’t quite know. She had stopped be- 
side a road to climb up a little tree after a 
cluster of wild grapes that she saw where the 
vine grew thick on the top of the tree. The 
others had gone, on. 

The noise of an automobile drawing to a 
standstill under the tree surprised her. There 
were four men in it. They looked very much 


9 


like the men that Mary Smith knew away back 
yonder when she was some one else. All four 
of them spoke to her at once, and as if 
they had known her for a long time. Their 
crude familiarity awoke more memories. 

“You’re one of those Samarcand girls,” said 
one of them. “Come along with us and we'll 
show you.a good time. Aw, come on, be a 
sport.” Mary Smith almost fell out of the 
tree. Her face flamed with humiliation. Tak- 
ing her wordless embarrassment for an un- 
spoken desire to accept their invitation, the 
four—“fallen men” the fair-haired woman calls 
them—renewed their importunings. 

“You—you—” Mary Smith had come down 
out of the tree by this time. Her eyes blazed 
now and her face was dead white. A moment 
she faced them, groping for decent words 
with which to scorn this offal that was offer- 
ing her insult. She couldn’t find them and to 
her lips rose once familiar invective, but she 
stopped short. On the impulse she turned 
and fled through the woods, never slacking her 
flight until she had overtaken the hikers. 

That night by the camp fire she told the 
fair haired woman about it. The story came 
brokenly, between sobs. The other girls heard 
about it, and after awhile one of them spoke 
for them all. The thing had happened before, 
and their judgment was not impulse, but the 
sober determination of women who had found 
themselves. 

“Miss McNaughton, if we could just catch 
one of ’em and if you’d just let us have him, 
he’d never come back here again. He would 
never go anywhere again.” 

Thus the “fallen woman,” the problem that 
has vexed man since he devised the moral code, 
thus the menace to society who was dragging 
men to hell had come up from the mire into 
which unhappy chance had trampled her. Mary 
Smith was a woman. Now she might go back 
to the judge who adjudged her a prostitute 
and look him in the face unafraid. She had 
been reclaimed. | 

And that is Samarcand. The little Scottish 
woman, Miss Agnes McNaughton, has done 


10 


what two hundred generations of men have 
failed to do—she has solved the problem of 
the “fallen woman.” It is too early yet to tell 
how far reaching her work is going to be. It 
is a bare two years old. But none can look 
upon the achievement of two years at Samar- 
cand and question the wisdom of the Governor 
who urged it, the General Assembly which 
authorized the initial expenditure, nor the de- 
cision of the Commissioner of Public Welfare 
whose energy brought it into actual being. 

There are 173 women, four babies, and nine 
teachers there today. There is not a man on 
the place, there are no guards, no barred win- 
dows, no restricting fences. That little woman 
from the Highlands of Scotland takes these 
women there upon whom society has stamped 
the red seal, gives them a chance to make good, 
and generally they do it. In the two years 
since she opened the place she has entered 203 
women and girls. Twenty-nine have been dis- 
charged, and the other one ran away some 
weeks back and they haven’t found her. 

Not all the women who go to Samarcand 
go there with the record of the woman we have 
taken as typical. Some have fallen lower. 
Many of them are young girls who have never 
crossed the line that marks a prostitute. Little 
girls who had not a chance at home to do any- 
thing but what Mary Smith did. Miss Mc- 
Naughton has found them in time to save 
them from the gutter. These she keeps nearest 
her, not trusting too much to the leaven that 
it at work in the institution. 

There are women at Samarcand as old as 29 
and there is a little girl there not yet twelve. 
The woman of 29 had children and no husband. 
One of her children was born at the institu- 
tion. She has learned to read and write there, 
to cook and sew and do all the things that 
have been delegated to the female of the 
species for doing. In time she may go back 
to the world to earn an honest living for her- 
self and her children. 

There is the case of a little girl whose real 
name is Mary. Mary is a little past twelve. 
She was taken in the street, and when the 


11 


policeman took her she cursed things around 
any blasphemer that he had ever seen. Her 
father and mother fought all the time at home, 
and Mary roamed the streets. She was a fe- 
male gamin. There was nothing to do but send 
her to Samarcand. The night she got there 
she addressed such a tirade of analytical blas- 
phemy as to shock the most hardened woman 
among them. 

This little gamin has been there now for 
half a year. Some days ago Mary, in a mo- 
ment of agitation, let out a simple “damn.” 
Nobody seemed to hear her, but that night 
after the house was dark the little Scotch 
woman heard a knock at her room door. Mary 
crept in, threw herself on the bed with her 
and cried brokenly in her grief over the lapse. 
She went to sleep with her head on the older 
woman’s breast. 

Then there is the girl from High Point. Her 
story duplicates the story of Mary Smith— 
which is the approximate story of reality with 
an occasional incident borrowed from some- 
body else to make for continuity—only the 
judge didn’t find her actually guilty. Two 
companions were found guilty and the judge 
knew a little of Samarcand. He was telling 
them about the chance they would have to 
come up from the stigma of prostitution. The 
girl overheard him. 

“Judge, can I go there—I haint had no break- 
fast and I won’t have no dinner nor no supper 
until it gets dark and I can go out and find me 
a man—” The amazed judge sent her along, 
and now she is one of the best cooks in ail 
Samarcand. She is happy in the freedom from 
the driving necessity of living when she has 
nothing to give in return for her keep but the 
instinct of race continuity that nature planted 
in her. 

Dr. Henderson built for a hundred. Miss 
McNaughton has 173 besides her teachers. 
There are 90 women and girls, some of them 
in jails, waiting for a chance to go to Samar- 
cand. Some of them have prostituted them- 
selves, and others are mere girls who have 
not yet gone that far. Not another one can 


12 


be crowded into the place as it is, and it has 
come down to the question of money where 
all such questions eventually come. Miss Mc- 
Naughton wants more equipment. 

But little has been spent for improvements 

here. Dr. Henderson built well when he built, 
but time has taken toll. His water and sewer 
plant has broken down under the strain of 
double service, and the girls bring the water 
that they use several hundred yards from a 
spring. There is no fire protection now save a 
well organized bucket brigade. There is very 
little fire risk, but at that, there is always 
that danger. 
The dress of these women is simple, but the 
laundry of 185 people, however simple are 
their individual sartorial effects, is an under- 
taking of considerable moment. These girls 
wash beside the lake, using their sturdy arms 
and old-fashioned washboards. The clothes are 
spread out on the grass to dry. They need a 
laundry. They need waterworks, and they 
need a new electrical plant. The one they 
have is sadly overloaded. The next General 
Assembly cannot well deny these women the 
chance that they have never had. 

“What would it cost the State to pass these 
women through the courts one time each year, 
and keep them in jail for half the time,” we 
asked Miss McNaughton. “What would it cost 
for the scattering disease with an inevitable 
percentage of these women carying diseases?” 

“It would cost many times what we are 
spending here. It would cost more than our 
budget calls for next year. That is the mere 
money cost, which is the cheapest thing about 
it,” she made answer. 

The germ of Samarcand was born in Laurin- 
burg. Years back Rev. Dr. A. A. McGeachy, a 
Presbyterian minister, now living in Charlotte, 
but having his beginnings in Scotland county 
in the church where Col. Murdock MacKinnon 
and Rev. John H. Coble were the ruling spirits, 
began to speak of a home for these women 
upon whom the world turned its back. It 
took years, but finally it came with the Gener- 
al Assembly of 1917. 


- It was a year before the Commissioner of 
Public Safety, Roland F. Beasley, found op- 
portunity to put the machinery into operation. 
As it so often happens when people want any- 
thing done, Beasley turned to the Pages of 
the Sandhills. J. R. Page, least known of the 
five distinguished brothers, found the Manor 
for him and it was bought for $22,500. 

The people of that community didn’t want 
any home for women in their midst and they 
protested. They were uneasy until Miss Me-. 
Naughton came among them. Now not a 
man and not a woman in that whole country 
but would fight for the little Scotch woman. 
The other day when we were there for a few 
hours two of the neighbors came by to see if 
there was anything that they might be able 
to do. They are self-appointed guardians over 
the unfortunate. 

There is no guard about the place. None 
is needed to keep the girls there. One might 
be needed to keep “fallen men” away from 
the place, but for the informal policing of 
these good neighbors. <A strange automobile 
cannot pass through that community day or 
night, but somebody will observe it. The 
first thought is to telephone Miss McNaughton 
and tell her to be on the watch. 

Once or twice they have broken through, but 
they didn’t know until afterward that the little 
woman was born in the Highlands. 

Governor Bickett has exercised admirable 
judgment in selecting the Board of Trustees. 
He has had,the advice of Mr. Beasley, to be 
sure, but the Governor has a unique record 
for selecting appointees, anyway. Chairman 
of the Board is Dr. McGeachy. With him are 
Dr. Delia Dixon Carroll, of Raleigh; Mrs. 
W.N. Everette, Rockingham; Mrs. J. R. Page, 
Aberdeen; W. S. Blakeney, Monroe. 

They have made Samarcand mean HOME to 
173 women. There was a tragedy in one of 
the larger cities of the State a year ago. A 
man with a 12-year-old boy took to live with 
him a woman with a 12-year old girl. Court 
proceedings took the woman from him and 
forbade marriage as well. To circumvent the 


14 


court, the man and the woman plotted mar- 
riage between himself and the little 12-year 
old girl. Again the court took action. The 
man went to prison, the woman to the work- 
house, the boy to Stonewall Jackson training 
school and the 12-year old bride to Samarcand. 
The court went further and set about annul- 
ment of the marriage. The girl was brought 
back for a witness. After a week she called 
the judge on the telephone. 

“Judge, I want to go home,” she told him. 

“Home!” exclaimed the judge. ‘You are at 
home now. I am not going to let you go back 
to Samarcand. I'll find you a nice place to 
stay.” 

“You'll not either,” she fairly shouted at 
him. “I’m going back to Samarcand if I have 
to walk.” She went. 


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Syracuse, N. Y. 
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FOR USE ONLY IN 

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